


The Lists of Clay

by Scarlet



Category: The X-Files, The X-Files: I Want To Believe (2008)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-07-24
Updated: 2009-07-24
Packaged: 2018-02-04 09:37:00
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,546
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1774408
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Scarlet/pseuds/Scarlet
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Mulder and Scully move into the Unremarkable House.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Lists of Clay

When figures show their royal front  
And mists are carved away  
Behold the atom I preferred  
To all the lists of clay!

Emily Dickinson - Of all the souls that stand create.

***

Day One

"Is that it?" Mulder asks, dropping what he hopes to be the last cardboard box inside the living room.

"There's a couple more by the stairs," Scully replies, going back outside. She wipes her dusty hands against her jeans, squinting at the slanting sun as it dips below the distant tree line. On the long rough track that links the house to the main road, the moving truck is already nothing but a little cloud of silent dust.

Scully pauses to take in her surroundings: the fields, the forest, the big wide sky, the cotton candy clouds. She's been avoiding doing so until now. As long as the truck had been here, there was always the possibility, the lingering temptation of turning around to say: "this is a bad idea, we can't live here."

But now she casts a glance over her shoulder, towards the house, allowing the reality of her situation sink in.

She and Mulder are going to live together. Under the same roof. In a house that would never make it in the pages of Good Housekeeping . They're stranded in the middle of nowhere - all right, Virginia. Close enough, bitches her inner DC woman, tapping her fashionably high heel in disapproval. What the hell were you thinking, Dana?

Gone are their respective home in Washington. What didn't make it here went into storage. There's a sudden tightness in her chest at the thought that she will never cross the threshold of her old apartment ever again, never hear the familiar cracks of the wooden floors under her feet, or notice the slight catch of the kitchen drawer as she pulls it open. She feels homeless, tetherless, bullied by the winds of fate.

"You all right, Scully?" Mulder squeezes her shoulder briefly as he brushes past her down the steps. She watches him lift one of the remaining boxes. He grunts, throwing her a sideways glare.

"Don't look at me like that, Mulder. You own as many books as I do," she tells him, moving aside to let him back up the steps.

"Well, I hope there's one about the fine art of chiropraxy in there, because I'm going to need it." He bumps his hip against hers as he climbs back up. "I'm not as young as I once was, you know?"

She smirks, then goes to retrieve the last box, which is, fortunately, light enough for her to carry without effort. "Is that some roundabout way of asking me for a back rub, Mulder?" she calls out as he disappears indoors.

"When have I ever used roundabout ways to ask you anything, Scully?" His voice drifts teasingly in the cooling dusk air.

She huffs. He has a point. 

"Will you stay with me?" he'd asked without preamble three weeks ago, after he drove her here for the first time.

Things had happened within the FBI. Skinner had let them know that they could stop running. The task force in charge of finding them had been dismantled and their file archived. Apparently, the combined weight of both Kersh and Skinner over their federal acquaintances had been enough to - if not give them a clean slate - at least shift the focus away from them.

Still, Washington was not safe for Mulder - she doubted it ever would be again - but at least they could stop living in motels.

Mulder found a house and asked her to stay. His question had sounded as formal as a proposal and she'd known right there and then that her answer would equate commitment as certainly as if he'd dropped on one knee. They'd weathered so much together, fought killers and monsters and polite men. They had been to opposite poles to save each other. He gave her a child she couldn't keep. She wasn't his wife but had been his widow. Why would she think twice before answering?

That day, she thought about her answer a lot more than twice. She hated the bruised look in his eyes when he picked up on her hesitation. She hated herself for it too.

So, instead of being back in the FBI fold, holding onto the costly strings Skinner managed to pull for her, here she is in Virginia. He'd sounded disappointed but unsurprised when she'd called him to say that, despite her gratitude for his efforts, she wouldn't be coming back.

"Are you sure this is the kind of life you want, Agent Scully?" he'd asked.

She'd felt like quoting The Rolling Stones, but had held back. He'd sounded too worried for jokes. Instead, she'd thanked him and told him everything would be fine. Of course.

You can't always get what you want. R.I.P., Agent Scully.

She pauses at the threshold, readjusting her grip on the box. An evening wind has risen, messing up her hair, blowing loose strands over her face. Maybe she ought to get a haircut, something short and sensible.

Yes, that's it, sensible.

She feels anything but.

And exactly what kind of life did you want, Dana?

Until a few years ago, she had a pretty clear idea of what she wanted. She was ambitious and made no apology for it. She wanted to climb the FBI ladder, impress her superiors, maybe make SAC within a few years. She would have gotten married to a kind man who understood the demands of her job, had a few children eventually. She would have successfully juggled her career and family life. Her friends would have been a little jealous of her good fortune and told her she was the luckiest woman on Earth.

She was confident she could have made this happen. Failure was not a concept she'd grown up with.

Then, one day, 9 years ago, she was summoned to the Hoover building and her best laid plans faded like footprints on a hot deck as the X-Files division swallowed her whole life. She could have walked out. She should have walked out. She had tried to once, but her resolve was snatched from her grasp in a hallway, by something that was definitely not anaphylactic shock. And after that... well, everything changed.

She enters the house and drops her burden in what is going to become their living room. Not that they have many options anyway.

She goes to the kitchen, finds the box where the newspaper-wrapped glasses are, and rinses one under the faucet before filling it up. The cold water is smooth and dulls the slight scratch in her throat. They've been breathing dust all day, but at least now the place is reasonably clean. A kiss on her neckline makes her jump slightly.

"Mulder."

"Hmm?" He wraps his arms around her, snatches her glass and finishes it. It annoys her a little, she's not quite sure why.

His cool lips brush her temple. "I need you upstairs." He releases her and leaves the glass in the sink. "How do you want that bed?"

"Horizontal."

"Is that the extent of your Feng Shui knowledge, Scully? This is very disappointing."

"If it can make you feel better, I can carve an eye of Horus on the headboard," she tells him as they both climb the stairs.

Mulder clutches at his heart. "I knew there was a reason I kept you around for all these years."

They enter the wide bedroom. The sky is gently turning purple beyond the two small windows. More brown boxes are scattered around the bed and just looking at them causes a wave of tiredness to wash over her.

"You did not 'keep me around,' Mulder," she tells him, hitting the light switch with a weary finger.

He turns to face her, a familiar flash of anxious doubt briefly sizzling in his eyes. "I know."

He reacts like this every time he thinks he's crossed a line, she's noticed. Even after all they've been through, he can't seem to trust her enough to believe she won't leave him one day. In Mulder's world, everybody leaves. Or dies.

She shoots him a warm grin. "I only stayed because I had a terrible crush on Walter Skinner."

Mulder barks a relieved laugh. "Yeah, I always suspected as much."

She presses her hand on the mattress, testing its firmness through the protective plastic wrapping. "I think it would be nice if it were under the windows."

"All right." Mulder goes to stand behind the headboard while she stays at the other end. They easily turn the bed in the desired direction.

Scully scans the room for the bags holding the linens, and finds them on top of yet another box of books. "We're going to need some shelves for all these," she observes. "How good are your DIY skills?" She retrieves the box cutter from her back pocket to cut through the tape holding the bags shut. 

"I made an ashtray from papier-maché once."

"How useful."

Mulder shrugs while peeling the plastic off from the new mattress. "Shelves are nothing but boxes with four sides, right? How hard can they be to make?"

She throws him a couple of blue pillow cases. "Famous last words."

"You're the one who told me I was very good with my hands."

Scully dips her head, pretending to dig further inside the bag. "And you're never going to let me forget it," she mutters.

"Damn right."

They stretch a white sheet over the mattress. He catches her eyes and waggles his eyebrows. She laughs, savoring for an instant the unusual feeling of domesticity. Can she remember how to live an everyday life? Can he?

Maybe this is what she needs after all. A place where she and Mulder can feel normal again. A place where they can catch their breath and find out if their relationship is more than intimacy bred out of urgency.

"Did you find a duvet cover?" she asks him.

"Yep, it's behind you in that green bag."

Scully opens the bag and bites her lip. "Hm."

"Don't you like it? It made me think of the night sky."

As seen by a very drunk Van Gogh, maybe.

"It's fine, Mulder, I'll buy the next one," she hands him the cover, watching with frank amusement as he wrangles it over the comforter.

"I see the pattern is the least of its flaws," Scully points out.

Mulder finally completes the task. He spreads the duvet over the bed and collapses across it. "You'll see, Scully. You'll grow to love it. It's an acquired taste," he tells her, rolling on his back.

"Like monkey pee?"

He gazes up at her, smiling softly. "Like me."

She leans over slightly to run a hand through his hair, and he catches her fingers. "We have a bed, Scully," he tells her, his thumb stroking the palm of her hand.

"We do," she agrees. He pulls on her hand and she shakes her head. "We have a clean bed, Mulder, and you and I are anything but."

His smile widens into a wolfish grin. The rest happens in a blur as Mulder leaps off the bed, lunges for her, throws her over his shoulder and runs towards the adjoining bathroom.

"MULDER! Put me down!"

He only does what she asks once they're inside the small blue room. She plants herself in front of him, crosses her arms and lifts her defiant little chin up at him. "I now firmly believe that millennia of Sapiens evolution completely bypassed you."

He shoots her a silent "Ah!" before taking his clothes off. There have been so many other things at the forefront of her mind in the past few months, so much tension and fear and grief that it takes a spontaneous moment like that to slap back into her the renewed awareness of him; the Vitruvian perfection of his long limbs, the lust that ignites low in her abdomen when he looks at her just the way he is now. Her sins are piled up to Heaven, but this one at least brings her no shame. 

Mulder pokes her in the chest with his knuckles. "Tarzan washes Jane."

She laughs and pulls her t-shirt over her head, "Fine, but Tarzan must hunt for shower gel first," she tells him.

He nods. "Be right back." She listens to his hurried footsteps as he stumbles down the stairs, and finishes taking the rest of her clothes off. They will need a hamper, she thinks, as she gathers their clothes and leaves them in a small heap in one corner of the bathroom. She turns the shower on. No bathtub, another thing she will miss.

Mulder comes back, and drops a bag of toiletries - his, she notices - by the sink. They step into the small cubicle. The water heater seems to be working fine, thank God. She barely has time to get her hair wet before feeling Mulder's lips follow the slope of her shoulders and the familiar warmth of his hands on her waist. 

"What happened to Tarzan washes Jane?" she asks him, being pushed forward until her breasts connect with the grey tiled wall. His hands slide down the curve of her ass. Questing fingers make her gasp and taste the faint coppery tang of the water.

"Tarzan lied."

***  
Day Two

Mulder is in his new study trying to decide on how to update his filing system when he hears it. Four or five weak, dissonant dying notes from Brahms' Lullaby. He takes a few steps to the doorway and pauses, watching as Scully slowly sets back down an unopened box on the dinner table. Unlike all the others, this one has nothing written on it. She is still as a Rodin marble, head bent, face partially hidden by the red veil of her hair. Her fingertips are resting lightly on the edge of the box like a pianist about to play a dirge.

Mulder's own hand presses painfully into the edge of the door. He hadn't thought she would have kept anything. She turns her head towards him, her gaze unreadable.

He walks to her, removes the box from her tenuous hold and carefully tucks it under his arm. "We don't have to open everything today," he tells her, trying very hard to sound casual. She gives him a small nod. She's got that faraway look that he hates, the one that does not welcome him, the one that does not share. She trusts him with her life but rarely with her grief.

Mulder goes upstairs and shoves the box in the attic. A rattle jingles briefly as it hits the dusty floor. He doesn't open it. Once he had a son and now he hasn't. Depending on the day, he blames or forgives himself just as he blames and forgives her.

She is not in the house when he comes back down and he knows better than to look for her. So he returns to his study, takes a big stack of files and fans them over his desk, trying to decide which filing system would be more efficient. Alphabetical? By year? By case type? He reaches out for the nearest folder and stops. You're not in the FBI anymore, Fox. Why do you need to do this?

With one angry sweep of his arm, files, papers and pictures scatter to the floor along with his pencil holder and geode paperweight. Mulder sits down wearily and cranes his neck towards the window. He doesn't see her, of course. She's gone for a walk. She does that when she's upset.

He needs to do this because he doesn't know what else to do. Some people keep soft toys from their childhood, he keeps newspaper clippings in filing cabinets. And right now, he'll take any familiar feeling he can get. Not being an agent anymore disturbs him more than he'd like to admit. He's forgotten how it feels to be Just Mulder.

But above all, he needs to do this so he doesn't have to find his partner and tiptoe around the William elephant again. He knows how to deal with Agent Scully, but Dana has always been harder to fathom; the furthest reflection of a mise en abyme.

Mulder leans forward and starts picking up the files.

***

She comes back after an hour, eyes dry as a freshly sanded tombstone. "Did you know that there is a pond behind the barn?" She asks him.

Mulder, looks up at her, kneeling down in the middle of the living room, surrounded by crumpled newspapers , books and a few lamps. "We have a barn?"

She picks up a lamp from the floor and shoots him a terse look. "You know perfectly well there is a barn, you signed the deed." He tries not to read anything into the fact that she didn't use a possessive. Agent Mulder was paranoid, Just Mulder will be… well, cautious, he's decided.

"Are you sure they're not stables?"

She puts the lamp on the table and looks for a nearby socket. "Now, you're just being contrary," she chides him, blowing a strand of hair off her face.

"Not at all. I'm pretty sure the deed said 'stables.'" He stands up and peels off a piece of duct tape from his knee. "Let's go and see."

"Mulder, it's already lunchtime and I really wanted to have the kitchen sorted by now. Can't exploration wait?" Her voice is just this side of whiny and it doesn't suit her.

Now is the time you shut your mouth about who's been wasting time. "No problem, we'll go later," he tells her, sitting on the couch and pulling another box between his legs. There is a small radio on the sofa and he turns it on. Country music blares out and he hurries to search for a football game.

Three hours later, Mulder appraises his surroundings with no small measure of satisfaction. Once he takes all the trash outside, the living room will finally deserve its name. His study needs more things on the walls for him to feel truly at home, but that can wait for now. He walks to the kitchen, trying to remember if there is anything easily edible in the fridge. He finds Scully standing on a chair, scrubbing the inside of a cupboard with a Brillo pad.

"I feel we should discuss the environmentally friendly policy in this household," he comments, picking up a bottle of Comet Softscrub from the counter and reading the label.

"We can back off once it's sterile," she replies, wiping her sweaty brow with the edge of her yellow gloves.

He grins. "I know you love your chemicals, Scully. We can build you a lab in the stables."

"Barn, Mulder. Besides, I can already tell you what's in here. Strep, staph, salmonella, Corynaebacterium… are we out of bleach?" Scully steps down from her chair, removes her gloves and goes to the sink to dab some water on her face. She uses paper towels to pat it dry.

"Or I could get you that pony you always wanted." Mulder says, opening the fridge and wrinkling his nose at its meagre contents. He grabs a carton of milk.

He feels her hand on his back as she stands on tiptoes behind him to whisper in his ear. "All my riding needs are already provided for."

Mulder swirls around and chokes, "Scully!"

She shoots him her sweetest smile before walking nonchalantly to the other end of the kitchen where two boxes are still waiting to be unpacked.

Mulder sets the milk on the table behind him, then retrieves a few eggs from the fridge as well. "There are extensive passages in the Bible warning me about women like you," he tells her, shutting the door with his foot.

"You're not Christian," she points out, kneeling down to open one of the boxes and starting to unwrap what appears to be a set of saucepans.

"Maybe, but I can still learn a thing or two from the Good Book. Do you have plans for an apple orchard, Scully?"

She turns towards him, hands resting flat on her thighs; her eyes darken and her smile is gone."Aren't you aware of the negative impact of too much knowledge by now?"

Mulder is about to retrieve a salad bowl from the drainer, but the sudden groundswell shift of her mood stops him dead in his tracks. "What do you mean?"

She stands up and brings the pans to the sink to wash them. "You know exactly what I mean, Mulder," she answers, snapping her gloves back on.

Mulder shakes his head. "I think you need to say it, Scully." 

She sighs. "Forget it." Suds are cluttered into little bubbly clouds over her gloved hands and she seems fascinated by them.

"No. Tell me," he insists, stepping closer.

Scully bows her head over the sink, her yellow hands gripping the edge like the claws of an eagle about to soar. Will she fly or will she fight, Mulder wonders.

There is a big kitchen clock lying on the table, waiting to be hung. Mulder watches the red hand click the seconds away, as Scully stands still with her hands in the water, saying nothing.

She finally turns to face him and pins him with a hard stare. Fight it is.

"What I mean is that you and I always have to bite the fucking apple. Knowledge cost us our son, Mulder."

There. She said it. The bull is out and roaming freely in the china shop. Mulder is surprised to feel relief more than anything else. Maybe because he knows what happens when the unsaid is allowed to fester. He saw what it did to his parents.They haven’t talked about their child since last May. He’s been like negative space between them, taking up too much room and rarefying the air around them.

"Do you really believe that?" he asks her quietly. "Do you really think we would have been left alone, had we known less than what we did? Do you really think it would have made an ounce of difference?"

His calm irritates her. She snaps her gloves off again and wipes her hands on a towel. "It might have."

"Our son is alive, Scully. Not with us, but still alive. And so are we. And I believe knowledge is what kept us that way. "

Scully shrugs, her eyes taking a mirror-like sheen. "We'll never know that for sure." She pulls at a loose thread from the sleeve of her frayed green sweater. "They might have left us alone if we had appeared to cause no threat," she says, twisting the thread around her index finger. 

He approaches her and catches her hand, slipping the thread off her finger and chucking it in the water behind her. "Or they might have shot our oblivious heads off." He catches her waist and pulls her to him. "Scully, you and I had to make hard choices, and only time will tell if they were the right ones."

Her cheek feels hot as she rests it against his chest. "Do you blame me, Mulder?" she whispers against his shirt.

He runs his hand soothingly against her back. "Of course not."

She pulls back to catch his eyes. "Don't lie to me now," she tells him sternly.

He sighs. "Sometimes," he admits.

She tucks her head under his chin again. "Good, because I blame you too."

"I know you do."

She looks up at him. "We have to be honest with each other Mulder, if we are to ever make this…" she waves at the room "… work."

"Okay." They hug each other tightly for a time, unwilling to separate, to create a gap between their bodies when they've just pulled themselves back together. "So we're good then?" he asks her after a while.

He feels a soft kiss at the base of his throat. "Yes, yes, I think we are."

***  
Day Three

A sharp series of sounds coming from down below wakes him up with a start. He quickly stops his hand from uselessly searching for his gun. Old habits die hard. There is a Scully void in the bed beside him. He can guess who's using the hammer he can hear again now. He gets dressed and goes to investigate. She's on the porch, surrounded by planks, with a box of nails at her side. He shields his eyes against the assault of the morning sun. "What are you doing?" he asks her.

She looks up, her hair tied back with a faded kerchief. "Shelves are nothing but boxes with four sides, right? I figured, how hard can they be to make?"

He grins, then crouches down. "Where'd you find the wood?"

"Stables." She returns her attention to positioning a nail.

"So you admit we haven't got a barn."

"You were right," she says, pounding the nail in. "I was mistaken."

"Be still, my heart."

"What?" she asks, reaching behind her for another plank.

"This air must be good for you, if it makes you admit so easily that you're wrong." He grabs a nail and tests the sharpness of the point.

"Air has no effect on my judgment. The Law of Large Numbers dictates that the more frequently an independent variable is sampled, the greater the chances of its mean approaching the expected value." She catches his look and adds: "You've got to be right sometimes."

"Whatever you say, Scully. They are stables and I shall savor my small victory."

She rolls her eyes and picks up a tape measure. "We need food, Mulder. We have to find the nearest grocery store."

"I'll go. I don't want to use the nearest one, at least for now. I'll try Roanoke."

Scully drops her hammer, rubs her hands over her thighs, a crease of concern on her brow. "Do you want me to go?"

"I'm not going to be cooped up in this house, Scully."

"Maybe, just for a little while. We don't -"

"No." Mulder cuts her off. "I'm going. Everything will be fine." He winks at her and stands up.

She knows how stubborn he can be and doesn't insist. She feels it is important for him to do this. Some small measure of control over his own life. She can relate to that.

"Maybe you should grow a beard."

He laughs. "And lose my dashing good looks? Never." He walks to the door. "Have you seen my wallet?"

"It's in the kitchen." Where you left it, she doesn't say.

He reappears half an hour later, freshly showered and shaved. He's twirling his car keys around his little finger. She lifts her eyes to him.

"We're going to have to talk about money at some point, Mulder."

"Don't worry about it," he tells her, bending over to tighten the laces on his sneakers.

"Mulder. I can't let you pay for everything. You've got to understand that."

"We'll worry about it later." He takes a small notepad from his back pocket and sits on the top step of the porch. "Tell me what we need."

"I'll find a job."

Mulder sighs. "Fine. Print out your resume and we'll do a tour of Virginia's morgues, if it's that important to you."

Scully catches his eyes, hesitates a little, then says, "I don't want to work with corpses anymore."

Mulder stares at her. Tectonic plates are shifting under them. "Uh, okay. What do you want to do then?"

She shrugs. "I'm not sure yet. I still want to be a doctor, just not a pathologist."

"Can you change specialties like that?" he asks her. He starts doodling on his notepad.

She smiles, shaking her head. "No, I'd have to be an intern again."

Mulder grins. "Will you bring your lab coats home?"

Scully raises her hammer. "I'm armed, Mulder," she warns him.

Mulder tosses his keys in the air and catches them. "Can't blame a guy for asking." He sobers up. "It's your choice Scully. I don't have to tell you that I'll be beside you, lab coats or not, whatever you decide."

She looks down. "We'll see." Her hand reaches for another nail. "Anyway, let's talk about our nutritional needs." She points her nail at him. "And don't say Cheetos."

***

Scully throws a satisfied, half lidded look at her shelf. It is rudimentary and she hasn't bothered with painting it yet, but it does what it's supposed to do: thwart Mulder's initial plan to recreate a paperback version of the Teotihuacan Pyramid of The Moon in their bedroom.

A stack of flattened, empty boxes are propped up against the wall near the door, a faint smell of Pine Sol is still lingering in the air from yesterday. She can hear crickets chirping in the fields outside.

The tranquility of the place weighs down on her like the steady crush of a winepress. These wooden floors are bloodstain free. Her heart tightens and expands like the throat of a frigatebird.

"Tell me a story, Mulder," she requests, curling up against his side.

"A story?"

"Mm-hmm, so I can fall asleep."

He pulls her against him, until her head rests comfortably in the crook of his shoulder.

"I don't know whether to be flattered or insulted."

Her short nails run over the soft skin of his belly. "Humor me."

He clears his throat, and she chuckles. "All right. Let me think," he says, while stroking her arm. "Once upon a time there was a princess who had fallen asleep on the prince's black leather couch."

Scully lifts her head to cast him an uncertain look. "Mul -"

"Don't interrupt. My story," he orders, pressing her head back down against his shoulder. "So, as I was saying, the princess had fallen asleep on the prince's couch. The prince covered the princess with a blanket and went to brush his teeth."

Scully snorts. "I always thought there was not enough emphasis on oral hygiene in regular fairy tales."

"Will you shut up?" Mulder scolds. "When the prince came back, the princess had disappeared. The prince thought she had gone home, until he saw that she'd left both her glass slippers behind. The door had been left open and for one horrible instant the prince thought... well, never mind what he thought."

"The prince thought that the princess had been captured by the dark prince and his evil minions from outer space again?" Scully asks, lightly poking his side with her index finger.

Mulder laughs. "Something like that, yes."

"I'm sorry," she says, stroking his chest.

"It's okay. Anyway… so, the prince ran outside and found the princess there, barefoot in the rain - smiling."

"The prince wasn't smiling," Scullly points out.

"No he wasn't, because he was one step away from calling all the King's men."

"I know." She's looking at him now with her hand tucked under her chin.

"And he said..."

"Scully, what the fuck are you doing out there?"

"Did he say 'fuck'?"

"He most definitely did."

"Fine. Then the princess grabbed the prince's ears…"

"Head."

"Ears."

"Head."

"As you wish, head. And she kissed the living daylight out of him."

"And then?"

"And then they should have lived happily ever after but shit happened."

"You don't say."

He shifts a little, letting his hand slide over her thigh like the silk of a bookmark. "Did you like my story?"

She shows him just how much she did.

***  
Day Four

She had been too exhausted by the move to notice it the previous days, but this morning the silence startles her awake with the grey light of dawn. Her city dweller's brain tells her that there should be noises coming into her bedroom. Passing traffic, the occasional squeal of a police car or an ambulance. She refuses to acknowledge that another kind of silence might also be waking her up.

She hates Brahms so much.

She slips on her jeans and steals Mulder's navy sweater before heading downstairs barefoot. After a brief stop in the kitchen, she steps out onto the porch, a cup of steaming coffee in her hand. The crisp herald of autumn can be felt in the morning air. Mulder had bought two rocking chairs and had hidden them until they'd finished dinner last night. She'd laughed, moved by his gesture more than she'd let on. She'd found it sweeter than a ring. Then he'd started singing Tom Lehrer's "When You Are Old and Grey," and she'd thrown a cushion at his head.

She sits on the rocking chair with a blanket across her legs. The forest will be beautiful soon. She runs her left hand over the armrest where the wood is both solid and smooth under her fingertips. Things are slowly settling back down inside her, like a cloudy sand bed after a storm. The outside of the house is full of weeds and overgrown bushes. She wonders if she'll be any good at gardening. She takes a sip of coffee. As she rocks back and forth, her foot presses rhythmically on a loose board and makes it creak. The house is singing to her.

She's home.

The End.

**Author's Note:**

> Disclaimers: Frank Spotnitz shook my hand. This gives me creative immunity. Yes, it does. Besides, you guys were done using them and they were so bored and pretty.
> 
> Thanks to Aloysia Virgata whose beta is as impressive as her writing. Day three was her idea. תודה רבה  
> And to Leucocrystal for being such a pistol fast grammar ninja.
> 
> I wanted to see if I was able to write a serious story that would not spiral into gut-wrenching angst. Pavlov's Moon had been a first step in that direction but I wanted to stretch this, get the Moose & Squirrel in my head to play house without everything going terribly wrong. Of course the end product is not entirely cheerful, but what do you expect when all you have to play with are one head drilled, kin traumatized, Lazarus wunderkind and one alien jacked-in, sprog dumping, oncological marvel?
> 
> All things considered, I think I managed to give them something their previous incarnations rarely got in my stories: hope.
> 
> The gardening reference at the end is a small nod to "Gardening in Tropical Climate" by threeguesses, because I loved the comtemplative atmosphere she created in that story.
> 
> "When You Are Old and Grey" is a hilarious song from the extraordinary Tom Lehrer.


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